I don’t if it’s true that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but I know this: Nothing makes the pedals feel lighter. I’ve ridden better in the last couple of months than, like, in twenty years. Not faster…just better. Legs feel light, recovery comes sooner rather than later, big gears don’t feel so big, that sort of magical, dreamy thing.

Several friends have gently steered me out of the death spiral of manorexic dietmania. MM, Tink, and Laurie have all gently reminded me that the point of all this is not to die from malnutrition, or to become so wasted that the only major achievement of the day is “getting out of bed.”

The starvation + coffee mode was highly effective to rid me of the ostrich girdle, but as a long term approach, after about nine weeks I began to crumble. Fortunately, there is a maintenance method I’m discoverying, or at least that’s my hope.

The maintenance approach is this: Figure out about how much I’m going to burn each day, and adjust my intake accordingly. I’m five days into it, and the main problem is all the time it takes to actually figure out the caloric value to all the different kinds of food and varying quantities, and to estimate the caloric expenditure before the day begins. I suppose that’s why Dog invented 5:00 AM.

There are lots of apps for calorie tracking, but the apps don’t really drill the calorie count into your head, and you end up depending on the smartphone. Needless to say, as soon as you stop tapping and tracking, the diet goes out the window. Just like the breakaway, out of sight is out of mind.

A pencil and paper, a calculator, “how many calories are in…” Google searches on the smartphone, and use of the iPhone’s notepad are letting me create a foodbase, and more importantly are teaching me that I can build a basic diet and then expand or diminish (or totally wreck) it as circumstances require.